A lot of the UN's work is done through conferences, and they're obviously meant to have an impact. Their environmental impacts, on the other hand, are rightly under critical scrutiny. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has made it a...

Alireza Ghaemi is head of Building Management Services (BMS) at the Vienna International Centre (VIC). More to the point, he's the man responsible for leading on the making this massive complex more sustainable, and pioneering an innovative...

Something had to be done about the UN Vienna International Centre (VIC). To put it bluntly, after 20 years of operation, it no longer came up to scratch. Its environmental performance left a lot to be desired.

When UN agencies were asked to identify the biggest element in their environmental footprint, the World Bank's answer was paper. All those reports and exchanges of written information at the core of the Bank’s work use tonnes and tonnes of it.

Aware of its exposure to climate change and the need to reduce its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the World Bank Group has set up a detailed GHG inventory system to track emissions across its worldwide operations. This not only tells it precisely...

One of the first UN organizations to get to grips with greenhouse gas emissions accounting, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has pioneered a procedure for offsetting the emissions it can't avoid. Having committed itself to become...

The United Nations is currently engaged in a five-year project to renovate its headquarters in New York. This so-called Capital Master Plan (CMP) is a massive undertaking. How the CMP team went about raising and running the USD 1.9 billion...

Thanks to a renovation programme carried out to the highest environmental standards in the summer of 2008, the 10th floor of an office block occupied by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) became the first UN office in New York to win...

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"The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity will strive to fulfill its mandate to assist Parties to conserve, sustainably use and benefit from biodiversity, whilst at the same time reducing its carbon footprint."